Asma bint Marwan
poet of the Ummayad clan
ʻAṣmāʼ bint Marwān (Arabic: عصماء بنت مروان "Ãsma, daughter of Marwan") was a female Arab poet said to have lived in Medina in 7th-century Arabia. Whether Muhammad ordered her assassinated for agitating against him is a subject of debate.
Islamic sources
Family and death
Both Ibn Ishaq and Ibn Sa'd wrote accounts of Asma bint Marwan's family and death. According to them, her family viewed Muhammad and his followers as unwelcome interlopers in Medina. After the Muslim victory over the Quraysh in Mecca in 624 in the Battle of Badr, a number of Muhammad's opponents were killed. In response, she composed poems that publicly criticized the local tribesmen who converted to Islam and allied with Muhammad, and that called for his death. Her poems also ridiculed Medinians for obeying a chief not of their kin. The two sources appear to disagree about whether Muhammad's then ordered her death or not.
Ibn Ishaq's account
Ibn Ishaq collected oral traditions about the life of Muhammad, some of which survive through the writings of Ibn Hisham and Ibn Jarir al-Tabari. Ibn Ishaq mentions that bint Marwan displayed disgust after the Medinian Abu Afak was killed for inciting rebellion against Muhammad.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Asma bint Marwan” as poet of the Ummayad clan. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as poet of the Ummayad clan. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q464937. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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- Expand the search: follow Asma bint Marwan primary sources, Asma bint Marwan archive and Asma research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Asma bint Marwan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.